John Berry

Red Dashboard LLC Publications presents a book by John Berry, titled Wobbly Man– John Berry’s Wobbly Man belies the fact that – like his poems – he is a trim carpenter par excellence. His poems show off the elegant moldings of earnest feeling finely wrought. But be warned: Berry’s invisible playmate is among those “weird-ass hippies” poet Dorothea Lasky loves. These poems rub us with patchouli and smudge us with sage so when we reach the other world we’re all hippies. —Ed Zahniser, author of Mall-hopping with the Great I AM and At the End of the Self-help Rope. John Berry’s Wobbly Man, are one of many lines which speak of becoming. Although each and every human endeavors to become, Berry’s breadcrumbs of memory, emotion and uneasy truths make it clear to the reader that becoming is the most difficult, yet most beautiful part of a human’s life. To know one is alive does not tell you how much one is living: Wobbly Man leads us through one man’s journey to becoming and living. —Angela M. Carter, author of Memory Chose a Woman’s Body. Wobbly Man is wisdom from a modern-day shaman that our world so desperately needs in these swift and turbulent times. Berry’s poetry is a fusion of Whitman and Rumi, and it provides the light at the end of the day that we all require to rejuvenate our souls and our beings. Wobbly Man’s testimonies to the healing power of nature, art, poetry and pure humanity resonate in every line. —Nicole Yurcaba, author of Backwoods and Back Words

John Berry is a native Virginian living and working in the Northern Shenandoah Valley. A highly skilled, self-taught woodworker, he has made his living as a carpentry contractor for over 30 years, most of that time as the president and chief source of labor for his company Woodwise Inc. Always a writer, John has found a renewed passion for his love of poetry through the simple act of giving himself permission to be happy and to joyfully explore life without guilt by living in the moment. It is in that moment that John found the courage to write freely, unattached to outcomes, exploring the craft purely for the joy of doing so. John Berry’s work has been published in Vox Poetica, The Yellow Chair Review, Disorder (a Red Dashboard publication) The Green Silk Journal, Crow Hollow 19 and The Good News Paper. John hosts the Shenandoah Poetry Alliance Open Mic on the second Wednesdays of every month at the Handley Library in Winchester Virginia. With his beloved wife Brenda, they live happily and gratefully enjoying the fruits of a simple spiritual life, and are faithful lovers of the unexplored byway or patch of woods never walked with their two Yorkies, Molly and Lily.